George C. Page
Encyclopedia
George C. Page was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 real estate developer, shipper, entrepreneur
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

 and philanthropist
Philanthropist
A philanthropist is someone who engages in philanthropy; that is, someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes...

; he is best-known as the namesake of the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits
La Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits are a cluster of tar pits around which Hancock Park was formed, in the urban heart of Los Angeles. Asphaltum or tar has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. The tar is often covered with water...

 in Los Angeles, California
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

.

Early life

Page was born in Fremont, Nebraska
Fremont, Nebraska
Fremont is a city in and the county seat of Dodge County, Nebraska, United States, near Omaha in the eastern part of the state. The population was 26,397 at the 2010 census....

. He lost his father at age five; Page and his brothers were raised by their mother as farmboys. When Page left for California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 at the age of sixteen—a goal he set four years earlier after tasting his first orange—the teenager had only $2.30 in his pocket. (Page later recalled, "I was so awed by the beauty of that piece of fruit that I said, 'I hope someday I can live where that came from.'")

Founding of Mission Pak

Page worked as a busboy (which he initially believed meant steering a bus) and a soda jerk
Soda jerk
A soda jerk was a person — typically a youth — who operated the soda fountain in a drugstore, often for the purpose of preparing and serving ice cream soda. This was made by putting flavored syrup into a specially designed tall glass, adding carbonated water and, finally, one or two scoops of ice...

 until he had earned one thousand dollars. With this capital, in 1917 he bought a vacant store and founded a distribution company, Mission Pak, which shipped California fruits like the orange as holiday gifts to cold-weather customers.

The idea came to Page as he boxed oranges home to his mother and brother one year earlier: thirty-seven residents at his boardinghouse had asked if he'd do them the same courtesy; the company proved enormously successful. (The Mission Pak jingle is still familiar to many older Angelenos: "Say the Magic words, say Mission Pak and it's on its merry way! No gift so bright, so gay, so right, give the Mission Pak magic way!")

At the time of Page's death, the president of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, USA in 1913 as the Museum of History, Science, and Art. The moving force behind it was a museum association founded in 1910. Its distinctive main building, with fitted marble walls and domed and...

 observed, "The story of George C. Page embodies the American dream. His
like will not come our way again."

Entrepreneur

Capitalizing on his shipping company's success, Page founded a sports car manufacturing plant. After selling Mission Pak in 1946, Page moved into real estate development; he built industrial and commercial parks, leased space to the defense and aerospace industries, as well as to the federal government. Having begun as a packager, Page thought this brought an edge to real estate; Page was always attentive to the value good landscaping could add to a project.

Philanthropist

Page financed the construction of buildings at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (the George C. Page Building), at Loyola Marymount University (George C. Page Stadium
George C. Page Stadium
George C. Page Stadium is a baseball venue in Los Angeles, California, USA. It is home to the Loyola Marymount Lions college baseball team of the NCAA's Division I West Coast Conference. Opened in 1983, it has a capacity of 1,200 spectators. The stadium is named for George C. Page, head of the...

), and in the district of Hawthorne, Los Angeles (the George C. Page Youth Center), along with arts programs at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

 and buildings and
scholarships at Pepperdine University
Pepperdine University
Pepperdine University is an independent, private, medium-sized university affiliated with the Churches of Christ. The university's campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean in unincorporated Los Angeles County, California, United States, near Malibu, is the location for Seaver College, the School of...

 in Malibu. The Pepperdine University Law School dormitories are named in his honor.

The La Brea Tar Pits

Page had begun visiting the La Brea Tar Pits
La Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits are a cluster of tar pits around which Hancock Park was formed, in the urban heart of Los Angeles. Asphaltum or tar has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. The tar is often covered with water...

 while in his late teens; it troubled him that to move from pits to the disinterred fossilized remains required a seven-mile trip to the Natural History museum. A half-century later, the museum that bears his name was opened to the public in April 1977. Page had devoted great care into each element of the museum—attractive fossil presentation, so it would not simply be "bones, bones, bones"; testing the most comfortable underfoot surface—carpet, not marble—and limiting the museum to exhibits that could be easily covered in about an hour. Among the site's visitors—five million in its first decade—were professional curators interested to see what Page, as an amateur, had put together. ""The thing that made me feel awfully good," Page told the Los Angeles Times in 1982, " was that they said, 'George Page, we have never been in a museum with things displayed so well.'"

Page described The George C. Page Museum
La Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits are a cluster of tar pits around which Hancock Park was formed, in the urban heart of Los Angeles. Asphaltum or tar has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. The tar is often covered with water...

as a kind of living bouquet he'd presented to the city: "This is so living, so immediate. It's like giving flowers that I can smell while I'm still here."

External links

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